Monday, February 2, 2009

Youth of today

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants. Old Tobold complaining about badly behaving youth in WoW again? No, Socrates (470 - 399 BC). Over two thousand years later, and grown-ups are still complaining about pretty much the same thing. :)

"Every generation before us had to fight for food, shelter and survival; everything that made up life for them, we had handed to us on a silver platter!" – And what do they do with such opportunity? They play video games and complain about life. Obviously not Socrates again, but a commenter on the Internet Movie Data Base quoting from, and commenting, the movie Corpse Run, which is going to premiere at the Cinequest film festival this February 27th in San Jose. The Corpse Run website has a trailer and some scenes, or you can find them on YouTube.

The film is about a group of young people who grew up playing video games. There have been countless books and learned studies written about this "Net generation", but of course the movie is funnier. And it can make you think. What if video games and the internet *do* change kids? Not necessarily the "GTA turned my kid into a killer" horror scenario. But wouldn't it be strange to assume that those kids could have spent thousands of hours with video games or surfing the net and not been influenced in any way? Ideas like that in the end you always win, like in a video game, or the sense of entitlement that comes from getting so much free stuff from the internet, might very well have changed the attitude of a generation. Unfortunately that attitude might not be optimal now these kids have grown up right into the maws of huge recession. Maybe we should promote video games that are all about hardships and having to struggle to get ahead. Everquest, anyone?